Review: Tilelicious: Delicious Tiles (Wii U eShop)

Taking popular games from other platforms and bringing altered versions of them to other consoles is a strategy we've seen a lot recently on the eShop. In order to succeed, developers need to vary gameplay enough to make it fresh and enjoyable. Tilelicious: Delicious Tiles takes the core gameplay of 2048 and turns it into something of its own on the Wii U eShop.

At its core, gameplay remains unchanged from 2048; by moving tiles in any of four cardinal directions matching tiles combine to form higher value tiles. In this idea, Tilelicious: Delicious Tiles succeeded. This game also has a charming aesthetic of themed levels, such as candy, pizza and more.

Unfortunately, behind this nicely done layer of graphical diversity is a broken version of 2048. No we don't mean the controls are broken, they work just fine, as simple as they are. No, there are a number of unnecessary errors that were created to differentiate Tilelicious from its similar cousin game that simply hurt the experience and make the gameplay annoying.

Firstly, the key to gameplay is in the new tiles that appear. These are low value tiles that must be added together to create larger tiles, and should all appear as low valued tiles. This is certainly not the case in Tilelicious. Besides appearing in random open spots (which is fine) this game goes too far in that the values of appearing tiles fall into too high of a range. While the idea is to be random, Tilelicious is far too random, because oftentimes high ranking tiles appear and ruin any chance at strategy.

Many times players will lose because the randomized tiles which appear are all different in value and cannot possibly be combined because no like-tiles are next to each other. It is infuriating when a loss is caused by randomness, but it seems like the intent here was to increase the number of losses dramatically.

The tiles themselves are another issue. They display images instead of numbers, though they do have numbers or letters on them to help keep them in order. This would be fine, if the numbers didn't disappear in later levels. In a simple puzzle game, players should not have to memorize pizza toppings in order of appearance and keep track of where they stand in their head. It just makes it all the more difficult to enjoy and win at, and further increases losses.

Whenever larger value tiles appear, a narrarator says "Nice!" or other sound clips to that effect. The words also appear in large print across the screen, right on top of the gameplay. This is just a bad decision. It makes the player stop and have to wait for the text to disappear, and seeing as later levels have a lot of high values involved, that's a lot of stopping. It completely destroys any rhythm and feels tacked on rather than adding anything to the experience.

Beating levels in this game might be the most frustrating of all, as you need to reach a certain numbered tile to proceed. This offers no replay value or incentive to play again at all, as it doesn't even keep a high score. The levels just stop. Any good run you might be having, oh well, just move on to the next level.

Many of the design choices in Tilelicious are baffling. The decisions were obviously made to differentiate from 2048, but all they end up doing is turning the game into a mess for anyone who wants to play. Many of the issues here could be easily fixed but weren't, and hopefully the next time around BattleLine Games can iron out any issues with gameplay before release.